CHAPTER IV

WILL ON HIS WAY

_Permit me of these unknown lands t’inquire,_

_Lands never till’d, where thou hast wandering been,_

_And all the marvels thou hast heard and seen:_

_Do tell me something of the miseries felt_

_In climes where travellers freeze, and where they melt._

CRABBE, “Tales of the Hall.”

I

THE coach from railhead to Chipstone was an hour and a half late, and

not all the flourish of its horn as it thundered into the courtyard of

“The Black Sheep” could disguise the fact. Not that it was the fault of

the coach: it had waited for the mail train, and this, for those parts,

parvenu monster had found an obstruction on the line, and was helpless

to go round it, as the driver and the guard complacently pointed out.

Their glory and their tips were shrunk like their circuit—unchanged

along the short route, they could no longer prod the slumbering

traveller with insinuatory farewells: they knew themselves, these

Chipstone worthies, a last lingering out-of-the-way survival of the old

order, doomed like the broad coaching road and the old hostelries to

decay; already they had seen the horned guard decline in places to the

omnibus cad, even as the ancient “shooter” of highwaymen had sunk to the

key-bugler; yet they preserved the grand manner before the revolution

that was deposing them—the Tom Pratt and Dick Burrage of a generation

of travellers—and while dispensing their conversation like decorations

and drinking your health as a concession, they retailed with gloomy

satisfaction every railway collision and holocaust, as though coaches

never overturned, and declared the English breed of horses would be

ruined. And when certain lines set up third-class carriages they

denounced the cruelty of packing the poor in roofless, seatless trucks,

as though they themselves had never brought into port frost-bitten peers

or dames sodden through their oilskin umbrellas.

But to-day “Powerful warrum” was the grumble of the passengers, even of

those on the roof, the majority being—thus early in May—still

smothered in box-coats; as for the unfortunates compressed inside, who

had likewise not yet cast a clout, and had similarly mistrusted the

sunshiny spell with which that pouring April had ended, they mopped

their brows and cursed the fickle British climate. But though the sun

had suddenly become hot enough to sour milk, it could not sour the

temper of the bronzed young man—his face nigh as ruddy as his hair—who

sat on the box-seat and conversed with Tom Pratt almost as an equal.

Even the long delay on the line had left him unruffled, thanks largely

to the blue-eyed girl in the train who before his clean-shaven

cosmopolitan air had shown signs of tenderness, and whose address his

purse now held—more precious than a fiver. Verily a pleasant change

after the Eveless back-blocks of Canada.

And the idea of calling this “warrum”! He smiled to think of the hells

he had known—Montreal with mosquitoes, New York in a damp heat. Why,

this couldn’t even melt a man’s collar. And how refreshing was the

trimness of the Essex countryside—the comfortable air of immemorial

cultivation—after the giant untidiness of the New World. How soothing

these long, green, white-sprinkled hedgerows with their ancient elms,

this old, historic highway with thatch and tile, steeple and tower,

after the corduroy roads of round logs or the muddy, dusty, sandy

tracks. How adorable these creeper-covered cottages after log-cabins in

backwoods; rotting floors on rotten sleepers and the mud paste fallen

out of the walls. He forgot that it was precisely this that he had fled

from nearly a decade ago—this dead, walled-in life, so petty and

pietistic—and he congratulated himself afresh on the wisdom of that

abrupt resolution to sell his clearing to a second-hand pioneer and to

farm at home with the profits.

His clothes alone would have kept him in good humour. Not only were the

heavier in what he had learned to call his trunk, but those on his back

were the first he had ever had made to measure. And they were made

too—like the neckcloth and shawl and fal-lals he was bringing to his

parents “from America”—by the world-famous firm of “Moses & Son”

(opposite Aldgate Church), whose imposingness was enhanced in his eyes

by finding it—on the Saturday he first hied thither—haughtily aloof: a

blank wilderness of shutters in a roaring world, with no gleam through

their chinks from the seven hundred gas-burners. But he had finally

stormed the “Private Hall,” toiling—as invited by rhyme—up “the stairs

of solid oak,” and had gained the heights “where orders were bespoke,”

and there—in that rich-carpeted “showroom with the giant chandelier,”

in a setting of Corinthian columns, sculptured panels, and arabesque

ceilings—dark enchanters with tape-measures like serpents over their

shoulders had made obeisance to him and enfolded him with their coils.

Even his billycock hat verified the bardic boast:

_There’s not another Hat-mart in the town_

_Which casts such lustre on the human crown._

Left to himself he would have liked a wideawake, but that _arbiter

elegantiarum_, the small boy, he was warned, had not quite acquiesced in

that. If it was not a coat of many buttons that he now sported, it was

scrimp enough to show off the fine lines of his figure; for the movement

towards ample waistcoats and wide trousers was not yet encouraged by his

Aldgate mentors, and pockets on the hips had been conceded him with

reluctance. In his large American trunk reposed a still grander suit of

Sunday sable, though he had shied at a frock coat, and was glad to learn

from these hierophants of the mode that morning jackets were no longer

confined to the stable-yard or the barrack-room, but were permissible

even in the country house—and there was no question but Frog Farm was

that. He had already worn his blacks once, on his visit to the Great

Exhibition, and they made, he found, a distinct difference to the

policemen in top-hats whose guidance he sought in the labyrinths of the

metropolis.

The delay in this visit to the Exhibition—the goal of his journey to

London—had turned out an advantage, he felt, giving him time for these

measured elegancies. If he had been unable to be in at the opening, as

he had grandly designed in Canada when ignorant that this involved

guineas and season-tickets, he had managed to squeeze for a glimpse of

the Queen outside if not inside the Park, and the first five-shilling

day—after all, only the fourth—was grandeur enough for a whilom

ploughboy and cabin-boy. Although nine ten-pound notes made a warm

waistcoat-lining, he was not under the illusion that he had returned

with more than a competence.

One would have thought London itself a Greater Exhibition to a young man

who had never seen it before: especially London at carnival with its

colossal crowds swollen by visitors from all countries in all

complexions and costumes: London with its numberless gay ’buses (plying

mostly to Hyde Park), its swifter gliding cabriolets of the new pattern

invented by Mr. Hansom, and the more stolid procession of four-wheeled

clarences, not to mention the fashionable and civic carriages with the

scarlet-and-gold pomp of flunkeys and outriders: London with its

countless curious street-criers, costermongers, ballad-mongers,

watercress sellers, muffin and hot-pie men, birdcage dealers,

tract-peddling Lascars in white robes, and vendors of everything from

corn-salves to speeches on the scaffold; blowsy, rowdy London that

turned into a dream-city when those strange figures with rods glided

through the twilight, flecking the long, grey streets with points of

fire.

But though Will Flynt was not insensitive to these fascinating

phenomena, and even rode about recklessly in the cabriolets at

eightpence a mile, yet London had not the spell to hold him. Only the

Great Exhibition had drawn him across the Atlantic. While awaiting

impatiently for the five-shilling day, he duly did the Tower and the Zoo

(sixpence extra for Mr. Gould’s humming-birds in the twenty-five glass

cases), paid twopence to go into St. Paul’s, and a shilling to see the

Great Globe in Leicester Square, patronized Phelps at Sadler’s Wells,

and the horses at Astley’s, had a peep at Vauxhall, enjoyed “Rush, the

Norwich Murderer,” at Madame Tussaud’s, and submitted the boots these

operations begrimed to the red-coated shoeblacks of the Ragged

Schools—London’s new word in philanthropy. But though he liked the

quarter in which his quaint galleried hotel, “The Flower Pot,” was

situated, with the Spitalfields Market and the tall old houses of the

silk-weavers, whose vast casements with their little panes rose story on

story, he was no sooner through with the visit to the Exhibition than

without a day’s delay—as promised in that letter to Martha—he took

train and coach to Little Bradmarsh.

Beholding him thus on the County Flyer hurrying towards Frog Farm, after

only a single visit to the stupendous spectacle, one may suspect that he

did not know his own heart as well as he imagined. But he himself had no

doubt of the magnet he obeyed, and he had found on his boat not a few

rich Canadians—and the Dominion already boasted four thousand

carriage-folk—who confessed to have yielded to the same irresistible

attraction. There was indeed little else talked of on the voyage: even

the wonders of the boat itself—a new Yankee iron and screw steamer of

nearly two thousand tons and quite five hundred horse-power that brought

them to Liverpool in eleven days from Halifax, and had spittoons and

wedding-berths like the Yankee river-steamers, and to see which the

Liverpudlians had flocked with their sixpences—paling before the

world-marvel awaiting them in London.

And London itself was talking of it no less: for once London was

staggered. And if London was thus shaken, how much more the provinces

and the world at large? Did not indeed the flags of all nations wave

over the great glass building, whose mere material would have been

enough to set the globe agog, even if it had not contained contributions

from every corner of civilization except Germany, which in that

antediluvian age figured in the catalogue only as “The States of the

Zollverein.” What wonder if with all the excursions and alarums and

millennial visions that attended its birth, the Press reeking with

paragraphs, poems, discussions, wrangles, skits, prophecies, and

forebodings, crowds equal to the population of provincial towns gathered

at the Park to watch it rise, and to stare at the endlessly inrolling

vans and the sappers and miners at work in their uniforms. One

M.P.—military and moustachio’d—won the immortality of the comic prints

by fulminating against the invasion of Freethinking foreigners who would

pillage London and ruin the honour of British womanhood: more sober

minds feared the Chartist mobs and the Red Republicans: even the

Catholics, already flaunting their cardinals and ringing their

unhallowed church bells, would profit by the Continental wave. The House

of Lords resounded with protests and petitions against the profanation

of the Park, and apprehensions as to the fate of the building erected

therein were equally rife: the great glass roof would be splintered by

hailstones, the walls would be overturned by the wind, the galleries

would collapse under the swarming multitudes, and Anarchism would seize

its opportunity amid the dismantled treasures of the globe. But one

unfailing factor was on the Exhibition’s side: the scheme was attacked

by the _Times_. And so Paxton’s building rose steadily till the great

day when through an avenue of three-quarters of a million spectators the

Queen and “that Queen’s indefatigable husband”—as a panegyrist of the

period put it—drove to declare it open to the elect thirty thousand who

had already found it so, while through glittering nave and transept,

with their fountains, trees, flowers, and statues, the “Hallelujah

Chorus” thundered from a thousand voices, two hundred orchestral

instruments, and a dozen giant organs; and the millennial hope welled up

in a grand climax of universal emotion. And hoary grandsires should

hereafter tell—proclaimed the poet of the Great Catalogue—what in this

famous century befell: grey Time should chronicle the victories gained,

since Mercy o’er the world and Justice reigned:

_What time the Crystal Hall sent forth her dove_

_And signed the League of Universal Love._

But although our Canadian pioneer had thus ample excuse for the unrest

that forbade him to miss this Messianic spectacle, it was not—even he

would have admitted—the Great Exhibition which had first unsettled his

stolid labours. That oscillation had been communicated some two years

earlier, and by a shock that had set the New World rattling even more

noisily than the Old was shaken by the Great Exhibition. The discovery

of gold in California was a seismic vibration that depopulated Eastern

towns, shot sober lawyers into wagons, sent clergymen flying along

mule-trails, swept timid tradesmen across the foodless and

robber-haunted Rocky Mountains, whirled schoolmasters fifteen thousand

miles round Cape Horn, and dumped them all waist-high in auriferous mud

and shimmering water, to be fed by Indian squaws. It was under the lure

of the Californian legend that Will had originally looked about for a

purchaser of his cleared acres. But by the time the farm was off his

hands, the glamour of easy gold had faded, and with a sum in his pockets

sufficient for a little respite, life seemed suddenly larger than lucre,

and he found himself possessed by a strange craving not to be away from

the old country in that year of years—the year of the Great Exhibition.

II

Chipstone had seemed strangely shrivelled as the County Flyer tore

through it; the High Street unexpectedly narrow and the great, gorgeous

shops, against whose panes he had flattened his youthful nose, curiously

small and drab, with diminutive sun-blinds; yet the quaint, blistered

bulge of the old timbered houses was fascinatingly as he remembered it,

and when the spirited quartet of tinkling steeds slackened under the

archway crowned by the ironwork sign of “The Black Sheep,” he saw

through a warm dimness that the ancient inn still gave on the

stable-yard with this same Tudor bulge, and that the courtyard itself

was little less rambling than the picture he carried in his memory.

There was the same mass-meeting of cocks crowing on the same golden

dunghill, the same litter of barrels, boxes, baskets, and parcels of

laundry-work, while the gardens of the whitewashed old cottages backing

the black-tarred stables and cartsheds seemed caught up as incongruously

as ever in the horsey medley. Why, there was the very shed which had

sheltered the farm-wagon the Sunday he was to drive it to Harwich. And

there—yes, actually there on the same doorstep, under the same hanging

ironwork lamp, was Ostler Joe, the shambling, bottle-nosed hunchback,

whose figure—in its reassurance of stability—struck him as positively

beautiful, and whose head seemed aureoled by the mist. But where was

that more expected face, where was the hair-swathed visage of Caleb

Flynt? Brushing the mist from his eyes, he looked anxiously round the

seething, sun-drenched courtyard. “Hullo, Joey,” he said at last.

“Wouldn’t my dad wait?” It was a pleasant voice with something of a

twang: but the twang was no longer local.

“Oi dunno your feyther from Adam,” said Joe cheerfully, mopping his face

with his shirt-sleeve.

“Yes, you do—old Mr. Flynt—Frog Farm.”

Joe shook his head—it seemed no longer a saint’s. “Oi never heerd

nobody mention Frog Farm nowadays. It’s a dead place.” He shambled off

on his many tasks with an aliveness that tightened the contraction Will

felt at his heart. His father dead?

“But look here, Joe!” He pursued the factotum. “You remember me—little

Will Flynt?”

“Can’t say as Oi does—moind that box now.”

“It’s _my_ box—and I wrote to dad to meet me with a trap. Guess he got

tired of fooling around.”

“There’s warious traps.” The hunchback waved a busy hand.

“No—he’s not here. And how am I to get my trunk home?”

“Bradmarsh carrier goos at three—you’re in luck.”

He heaved a parcel now into a driverless tilt-cart, where a little white

dog boisterously mounted guard. “That’s ’er!” he said. “Take you too if

you’re smart.”

“Daniel Quarles!” A fresh wave of reassurance radiated from that old

household word on the familiar tilt. So the venerable carrier was still

plying, how then could the comparatively juvenile Caleb be extinct? The

May Day ribbons not removed from Daniel’s horse, and making it a

snow-white steed from fairyland, dispelled the last funereal images.

Surely had Caleb Flynt really died, old Quarles would never have left so

lively a topic untapped with Joey.

But here Will’s meditations were agreeably cut short by another vision

from auld lang syne—the laced mob-cap and blonde kiss-curls of Mother

Gander, to whom Dick Burrage was gloating over the train’s misadventure.

There were pouches under the blue eyes, and no gold chain now heaved

with her blue silk bosom: otherwise she was her old comely self. But

fresh from his grand hotel in Spital Square, Will no longer regarded her

as an awful and aristocratic personage, able to eat meat at every meal.

An easy accost and inquiry about the old Flynts of Frog Farm brought him

soothing information. Lord bless his soul, people living a healthy life

like that never died—unless they took medicine. She couldn’t say they

had been to chapel lately—indeed she had gathered from the postman that

the old wife had taken up with some New Jerusalem crankiness. “But

you’ll find the Bradmarsh carrier in the parcel-shed—that black one.

You ask _her_!” And with a wave towards the arch she turned again to the

beaming Dick Burrage.

Will thought the “her” referred to a chambermaid who was just passing,

but he saw no need of such guidance—the parcel-shed was obvious enough.

His mind was occupied with the odd fact that Mother Gander had

apparently become a sister in the spirit to his own father, while his

mother had moved on to another eccentric doctrine. Ah well, changes were

bound to come. Not everybody could be of the same immutable granite as

himself.

He found the parcel-shed deserted save for a young girl who, busily

heaping up parcels into the willing arms of Joey, did not even look up.

Somewhat depressed by the chapel-memories the landlady had conjured up,

he stood a moment, absently watching the operation, and wondering why

the agreeably pretty creature should be dispatching so many

parcels—wedding-cake came into his mind, though the oddly varying shape

of the parcels was not consistent with the hypothesis. He would

willingly have loitered—the chapel-cloud was dissipating—but the

carrier was clearly not here, and, as the church clock opposite was

booming three, he was afraid old Daniel might be starting off without

him, so he hurried back to the pranked and pawing steed, only to find

himself derided and defied by the little dog, which he now observed was

also adorned with a May Day bow.

And then he remembered he was hungry. The block on the line had robbed

him of his dinner, and he wondered whether to go off with that grim

Gaffer Quarles would be so enjoyable as walking—after a square meal.

No, why should he be thus whisked off? Why not a leisurely spread at

“The Black Sheep” preceded by another glimpse of the girl in the shed,

and then a long stroll home by the dear old field-paths, through Plashy

Walk and Swash End, dry enough doubtless under this sun? Besides, his

slow old parent might be on the way after all—there was no certainty

the carrier with his compulsory windings and detours would not miss him.

Yes, it would be kinder to his father to give him another hour or so.

“The May Queen” he murmured to the air, brooding over Methusalem’s

belated ribbons. Yes, they would surely have made her that; though

perhaps the old custom was no longer kept up. True, she hadn’t the blue

eyes or the plumpness of the girl in the train, and was not stately

enough for a queen—though of course you couldn’t really tell how

Victoria looked outside her royal carriage. But then you couldn’t

imagine the blue-eyed minx in a royal carriage at all: you placed her

smiling behind bars, manipulating beer-handles.

“It’s all right,” Joey startled him by announcing, toppling his tower of

parcels into the cart. “Oi’ve made inquirations. The old Flynt chap be

aloive and kickin’.”

“Oh, thank you.” Will’s last shade of uneasiness vanished. He slipped a

sixpence into Joey’s palm. “Put my box in—I’m not going myself—say

it’s for Frog Farm.” And he jostled back to the parcel-shed, through the

bustle of boxes and jangling of bells, barging into other carriers from

other circuits, stumbling over dogs that yelped, tangling himself in the

whip of a postboy who was frantically buttoning his waistcoat, and

nearly run over by the great coach just wheeling round. He was more

disappointed than surprised when he at last reached the shed to find it

empty, though far fuller than before of mere people. Still, there was

always dinner.

III

But dinner was not always.

“No, I’m afraid it’s all gone,” said Mother Gander. She was blocking the

way at the foot of the stairs, where a painted hand under pendent

stag-horns directed you upwards to the “Parlour”—“The Black Sheep”

would have none of your new-fangled “Coffee Rooms”—and Will Flynt,

sniffing up the odours of beer, sand, tobacco, gin, snuff, and tallow

like an ambrosial air, felt a further elation in the thought of its

being now a beckoning not a monitory hand: to ascend to those unexplored

heights, mysteriously grand to the boy, seemed symbolic of his rise in

life.

“But haven’t you got _any_thing?” His face fell.

“Nothing fit to offer,” said the landlady.

“But I’m hungry—and I’ve got to wait here.”

“You’re not staying for the night?” she queried.

“I may,” he said, to encourage her to produce some food.

“Oh, but we haven’t a room empty.”

He reddened. Was it possible she recognized the hobnailed lad of yore,

refused to serve him or to allow him up her aristocratic stairs?

“You haven’t a room empty?” he repeated incredulously.

“There’s a poky garret,” she said, “and another man would have to go

through it to his bedroom, and he goes to bed very late and gets up very

early. But even our best rooms are stuffy and our corridors are that

dingy people are always tumbling against the brooms the maids leave

about; when they’re not tumbling down the stairs. Look how steep they

are! The whole house is badly built—it was never meant for an

hotel—and the service is disgraceful.”

Will, overwhelmed, stammered out deprecation of her abuse. The inn was

most picturesque, he urged, and it was not the fault of the house if the

coach was late; as for himself a crust of bread and cheese would suffice

to stay his pangs.

“Well, go up and see what you can get,” she rejoined sceptically, moving

aside. Relieved to find the barrier raised, he ascended the dog-legged

staircase; his boyish awe resurging. Alas! even the landlady’s

disparagement had not prepared him for this dishevelled scene—dirty

plates and greasy knives and forks and tobacco-stoppers and sloppy

pewter pots that had stamped bleary rims on the fly-haunted table-cloth,

and a waiter in his shirt-sleeves dining, like a gentleman, off the

ruins.

“Wegetables and pastry is hoff!” murmured this disturbed gentleman.

Will was retreating—bread and cheese at the bar amid the glinting

bottles and shining beer-handles seemed more appetizing—but the waiter

had sprung up, his mouth still masticating but his coat conjured on, and

had him fixed instanter on a Windsor chair at a clean little

sun-splashed table by a side window that was refreshingly open and gave

on the cheery courtyard.

A cut of the devastated joint, strong mustard pickles, a hunch of good

bread, a pint of porter and the freedom of the cheese to follow, soon

dispelled the dismalness of the room; an effect to which the attendant

magician contributed more literally by his great trick of vanishing

crumbs and disappearing plates, including his own half-eaten meal. How

good it was, this cold roast beef of old England, how equally redolent

of the dear old country those hunting pictures on the low wainscoted

walls, with all their gay bravado. There were four of them: _The Meet_,

_Breaking Cover_, _Full Cry_, _The Death_; all populous with spirited

pink gentlemen and violently animated dogs and horses, culminating in

the leading dog tearing the fox, and the leading gentleman waving his

tall hat in rapture. He quaffed voluptuously at his frothing pewter pot.

To the Queen of the May—ay, why not drink to _her_?

“How’s Mr. Gander?” he asked irrelevantly, with a sudden image of the

bull-necked landlord and his massive gold scarfpin.

The waiter—on the point of disappearing—materialized himself again,

and stared at the questioner.

“He ain’t _any_how,” he gasped at last. “At least that’s a secret ’twixt

him and his Maker.”

“Dead?” It was Will’s turn to gasp. Could so much gross vitality be

extinct, or even rarefied?

“Dead and married over. She’s Mrs. Mott now, though the old customers

will keep on with the Mother Gander, just as I have to bite my tongue

not to call her husband Charley.” He lowered his voice. “He was the

potboy once.”

Will whistled. “What women are!” was in that knowing note. How pleasant

it was thus to discuss—with beer and pickles!—life and death and the

sex.

“Yes, sir—the potboy, and busting with pride if I let him hand up the

plates at the Bowling Club dinner.” A sigh accented the cruel change.

“You’ve been away, sir, I presoom.”

“Half round the world,” said Will with airy inaccuracy. “But why didn’t

_you_ go in for her?”

“Me! With my old woman! Besides _I_ wasn’t going to turn Peculiar—no,

not for ten ‘Black Sheep.’ You’ve heard o’ Peculiars, sir?”

“Ye-es.” A cayenne pod in the pickles made him cough.

“Thick as blackberries about these parts—and as full of texts as the

bush of prickles.” The waiter’s voice sank again. “She made poor Charley

into one of ’em. He’s got to go to chapel three times every Sunday and

once on Wednesday.”

“Poor chap!” There was sympathy as well as mockery in Will’s tone. “But

can you tell me”—he had a sudden remembrance—“why she runs down this

place so? Is it her Peculiar conscience?”

“Ah! I’ve heard others arx that too. My opinion ain’t worth a woman’s

tip, but I can’t help fancying it’s more defiance than conscience. Time

was, you see, sir, folks kept away, and it sort o’ soured her. I don’t

want your rotten custom, she as good as says to all and sundry. Take it

to landladies who’ve arxed your permission to marry. And so they come

all the more, sir, yes, and cringing to have rooms, and pays her

whatever she asks. There was lots o’ grumbling in the old days: now you

never hear a complaint, except from herself. My stars, the money she’s

making! But I can’t say I envy Charley—not even when he bullies me.

Although in marriage if it’s not one cross it’s another, ain’t it, sir?

Or perhaps you’re one o’ the lucky ones.”

“I’m not married at all.”

“That’s what I mean.” And the waiter sighed again. “Got all you want,

sir?”

“Everything, thank you—not wanting a wife.”

His laugh, gurgling away into his pewter pot, evoked only a deeper sigh,

on which the waiter seemed wafted without.

IV

Simultaneously—through the opening or closing door—something was

wafted within. Our complacent young man at his place in the sun, with

the glow of freedom at his heart and of porter at his throat, was

startled by something leaping on his knees, which, automatically fended

and thrust away, was felt as clinging claws scraping down his new

trousers. Coughing and spluttering, and with the beery glow changing to

a choke, he perceived that it was the carrier’s little white dog, the

very same that had warned him off its master’s goods; unmistakable by

its pink bow. So the doddering patriarch had not yet started, he thought

lazily, though he must now be back in his cart or his canine sentry

would not have gone off for a farewell prowl. He helped himself to

another cut of beef, and his thoughts wandered from Mother Gander to a

builder’s widow he had known in a Montreal boarding-house, a widow to

whom he could certainly have played the Charley had he cared to go so

far. He seemed to hear her foolish whimpering the day he left for the

backwoods, but he became aware that it was only the carrier’s dog

whining.

It was begging so prettily on its hind legs, looking so appealing in its

pink bow, that he was soon feeding it rather than himself, and morsel

after morsel fell to it, each gulped down with such celerity that from

the creature’s instantly renewed and unchangingly pathetic posture of

supplication, an absent-minded man would have doubted if he had fed the

brute at all. But finally the young man pushed away his cheese-plate,

and dropping with plenary satisfaction upon a horsehair and mahogany

arm-chair that stood by the empty grate, he lit his cherrywood pipe with

a brimstone match and followed his springtide fancies in clouds of his

own making. Thus the second pounce of the dog on to his knees found him

acquiescent, even caressing, and with a beatific grunt the animal curled

itself up as to an æon of repose.

Then a horn sounded, and with a convulsive start the creature was off

his lap and scratching and yapping at the closed door. Will, too, had a

moment of wild wishing he had engaged a seat in the cart—the thought of

walking in this heat was no longer alluring—but it was equally

unimaginable to get up now and rush like the animal. Besides, he hadn’t

paid his bill, he remembered not discontentedly. Meanwhile the

distracted little dog had darted back to the window and leapt on the

sill, but it was obviously cowering before the depth of the jump. He was

feeling he really must get up and do its will, when to the satisfaction

of the slothful man and the bliss of the active beast, the door opened,

and like a streak of lightning the white figure had forked across the

room and vanished. He turned his head lazily to the window to see if it

would catch its cart, but was only in time to see the tail-board with

his own box disappearing through the archway, pursued by Joe with a

belated bundle. Then the new-comers claimed his languorous attention.

V

Strictly speaking, there was only one new-comer and he was hanging back

at the sight of the London-tailored guest, being himself in moleskins

and bent and fusty, though Mother Gander was clearly beckoning him

forward. “The gentleman’s just going,” she said sweetly. Will knew not

whether to be drowsily pleased at the status he had achieved in his own

neighbourhood, or sluggishly wrathful at this renewed attempt to be rid

of him.

“Plenty left,” he observed encouragingly, puffing immovably.

“Oi reckon, sister, Oi’ll feed in the taproom.” The voice sent strange

vibrations of resentment through Will’s being, and particularly through

his nostrils, where a mysterious smell of aniseed was called up, whether

from memory or the actual moleskins he could not make out.

“You’ll do no such thing,” said Mother Gander sharply. “It’s less

trouble here. Remember what James says.”

Who was James—was her husband not Charley?—Will was wondering

dreamily.

“Chapter two, warse two—Oi take your p’int,” answered this odd figure,

whose wizened face with the straggling whiskers seemed loathsomely

familiar. But though the beady eyes under the moleskin cap were turned

for a moment full on his, remembrance stirred but feebly through his

after-dinner lethargy, and it was not till the intruder had sinuously

and softly skirted the great dining-table and begun solemnly turning the

faces of the hunting pictures to the wall, like naughty schoolchildren,

that he was dully conscious of the secret of his abhorrence. There—on

the very first day of his return—was Joshua Mawhood, the

button-snipping villain of his story!

Mother Gander stood by silent, as one properly censured. Neither did she

protest when, slashing a giant gobbet off the beef, he carried it on the

point of the carving-knife to Will’s mustard-strewn meat-plate, and

bearing the same with its dirty knife and fork to the remotest corner of

the table, fell to with audible enjoyment.

“I’ll send you your milk, Deacon,” she said, turning to leave the room.

“Don’t copy Jael too far,” he answered, with a grimace.

“Copy who?” asked Mother Gander, mystified.

“Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite—her as killed Sisera. Like me he

asked for water, and, like you, she gave him milk. But she meant to nail

him like a stoat.”

“Me murder you!” said Mother Gander with a scandalized air. But she was

clearly impressed by his erudition.

“’Tis onny my fun. But you look up Judges, chapter fower. They’re

beacons to us—they old Hebrews and Hebrewesses—beacons.”

“Would you rather not have the milk?” Mother Gander was still a little

puzzled.

“’Tain’t for me to refuse a sister’s kindness. And the best way to repay

her is to take it with rum. Bein’ as there’s a wisitor, the leetlest

drop o’ rum in it, to show Oi don’t howd with your rebukers in that

regard. Send the bottle separate, to be plain to all beholders.”

“And send me another pint of porter, please,” added Will. He felt he

must justify his stay even as the Deacon must justify his drink. The

ecclesiastical preferment that had come to Elder Mawhood amused him—his

boyish resentment faded suddenly, and the respectable rat-catcher—after

all, the motor-impulse of his fortunes—now loomed through a cloud of

kindly indulgence; even touched with the glamour of early memories, with

the magic of those far-off winters whose approach had brought the expert

to Frog Farm, as surely as it brought in from the hedges the creatures

against whom he waged cunning battle in the war-zone of the barns and

outbuildings. How thrilled the boy had been by the great traps and the

pack of ferrets—nay, had not the strange old man seemed himself a

larger ferret, with his tight-fitting moleskins, sidling motions, and

curiously small shining eyes? What a joy his annual visit—with what

fearful interest the bunch of children had listened to the annual

contract, made for gross sums, or for particular buildings, sometimes

calculated per tail of rats! The Elder had always made a point of the

cost of the shoe-leather involved in the isolation of Frog Farm.

Aniseed, Will suddenly remembered, had played a considerable part in

beguiling the victims, and the scent of it, coming up

again,—dream-whiff or reality—was now incongruously mingled with a

flavour of youth and innocence, touching our rustic Ulysses almost to

tears. He wheeled his arm-chair window-wards to hide his emotion, and

puffed into the courtyard.

“Oi don’t object to your smokin’,” mumbled the Deacon.

“Thank you,” said Will. “You don’t remember me, I’m afraid, Mr.

Mawhood.” “Deacon” he could not bring his tongue to. “I’m Will Flynt,

the looker’s boy you were always so kind to. You let me set your traps

and dose the bait.”

The Deacon shot a beady look at him, but shook his head.

“Why, you let me smell your ferret once, don’t you remember, when it

came out of the hole by the Brad, and you said that though I hadn’t

heard a squeak or a scamper, your nose could tell there had been rats in

the run.”

“There was swarms of boys at Frog Farm, all bad ’uns. Oi never knew ’em

by tail—but Oi dessay Oi do remember ye in the rough.”

Will was strangely disappointed. “Don’t you remember I lent you my slate

to hide the trap from that cute old rascal?”

“Ay, warmints allus runs to cover,” said the Deacon vaguely.

“And when caught he wouldn’t eat the bait, surely you remember?”

“They never does. Rats has more sperrit than lions,” said the Deacon

with enthusiasm.

The abortive attempt to recall himself to the rat-catcher was ended by

the return of the waiter, whose delicate balance of rum-bottle,

milk-glass, and pewter pot on the tiniest of trays, was almost upset by

the sight of the blank backs of the hunting pictures. He seemed as

startled as though he was not in the conjuring line himself. Depositing

the drinks, with his usual sleight of hand, at both ends of the room

simultaneously, he made as if to reverse the pictures. But the Deacon

emitted a sibilance so terrifying that he did the vanishing trick

instead. The old man then produced from either pocket a pale-yellow,

pink-eyed creature, and emptied the milk-glass into a saucer. “How

thirsty they gets this weather,” he observed, as they lapped greedily at

the milk. “Pore things—their need is greater than mine.”

VI

Will was sipping his porter _piano_, and the Deacon his rum

_strepitoso_—the ferrets back in his pockets—when the door opened

afresh, and a new figure protruded through it, likewise drawing back

when the room which should have been empty at that hour was seen to be

in occupation. This was, however, a very different figure from the

Deacon’s: a figure jovial and ponderous, sporting a floral dressing-gown

and carpet slippers, and with all the air of having just left an

adjacent bedroom.

“Come in—don’t mind me,” called Will cheerfully.

The smoker’s invitation not being negatived by the muncher and bibber,

the massive visitor padded forwards, revealing more clearly his

heavy-jowled hairless rubicund face and the motley multitude of stains

on his gay dressing-gown, and waving a roll of clammy-smelling posters.

“Just come by the coach—and in the nick o’ time,” he observed genially.

And espying in the reversed pictures a favourable background for his

operations, he circumvented the table (not without surprise and disgust

at the corner where the moleskinned man grunted, guzzled, and guttled),

and hung up two of the bills on the nails without any observable

astonishment at the state of the pictures or any apparent attention to

anything but his own interests; stepping backwards to survey the effect

with such absorption of mind that through the girdle of his

dressing-gown his spine collided with the table.

“No, my boy!” he addressed Will. “They can’t print like that in

Chipstone.”

From his arm-chair Will could easily read the more glaring headlines:

TO-NIGHT AT SEVEN—LIFE-SIZE

DUKE’S MARIONETTES

_Hamlet And The Ghost_

MARGARET CATCHPOLE

_Pantomime-Ballet_

THE MISTLETOE BOUGH

_The Beggar of Bethnal Green_

EDMUND, ORPHAN OF THE CASTLE

_The High Road to Marriage_

AS PERFORMED BEFORE ALL THE CROWNED HEADS

_Of Europe, America, and Australia_

N.B.—Miss Arabella Flippance at the Piano

“Sounds bully,” he observed politely.

“Bully’s the word, my young American friend,” said the Showman. “What a

pity the mail-coach was late—we might have had ’em stuck up for the

ordinary and caught some shilling patrons. You’re staying here for the

night, I hope.”

“No—I’ve got to go on.”

“What a pity! I was about to offer you a front seat.”

“Me? Why?”

“Must fill up somehow,” said the Showman frankly. “People never go to a

play unless they think they can’t get in. And as we only open to-night,

there’s not been time to advertise our bumper houses. You see, sonny, we

lay up here for the winter, and if we’d started before this heat-wave

we’d have caught more colds than coppers.”

“Is it open-air then?”

“No, but the next thing to it—a tent! By squinting out of that window

you’ll see the whole caboodle rising on the meadows like a giant

mushroom. Why not stop here and pick up a young lady? I’ll give you

_two_ seats.”

“Don’t want more than one seat when I’ve got a girl,” laughed Will. Then

the face of the girl in the parcel-shed came up, at once alluring and

rebuking, and he repeated that seriously he must be off.

“Never mind—better luck next act,” said the Showman, and tugged

furiously at the bell-pull, and the waiter appeared with a glass of

brandy and water, as though he added thought-reading to his conjuring

accomplishments.

“Well, here’s to our better——!” began the Showman. His eye, raised

towards Will at the window, caught suddenly something in the courtyard,

and setting down his untasted glass and snatching up his posters he

disappeared almost as frantically as the dog.

“He’s forgot he ain’t dressed,” chuckled the waiter.

“Seems to be a merry gent,” said Will.

“Lives here all the while the show is on,” said the waiter, not without

pride. “Pays me a shilling every time I go in.”

“I hope on the same principle Mother Gander will pay _me_,” said Will,

laughing, and ordered his bill: which he found as unreasonable as the

food was excellent. He did not, however, mulct the waiter of the

handsome tip, designed to show him not a woman but a man and a gentleman

at that, and the waiter finally disappeared with congees instead of with

conjurings.

“I know you will excuse me, old fellow,” said the Showman, re-entering,

“but business before pleasure. Fact is, I got up too late to catch the

carriers, but now I’ve got the postman to leave my bills at all the

public-houses on his next round. Good fellow, Bundock, though why he

should boast so over killing two frogs with one stone, I don’t

understand. It seems an operation as cruel as it is simple.” Here he

swigged at his neglected glass. “He made a point, too, of my not

employing the Bellman.”

“You’d have done better with the Bellman here in Chipstone and over at

Latchem,” volunteered Will. “Where Bundock mostly goes, you’ll never get

’em to come.”

“That’s what Bundock said. But don’t you believe it, sonny.” He held up

a huge hairy forefinger, half gilded with a great ring. “They’re only a

canting lot o’ sons of slow-coaches. They’ve never had the chance of

knowing what they like. Temptation’s the thing.”

The diaconal sibilance that greeted this sinister sentiment fell

unheeded on the Showman’s ear, or rather he did not distinguish it from

the worthy Mawhood’s general medley of guttural and nasal noises.

“There’s no greater temptation,” added the Showman, “than Shakespeare

and the Ballet.”

Will shook his head. “They don’t know one from t’other. Did—I mean, if

they did”—he had slipped into the old idiom—“they’d be scandalized.

Why, I went to see a piece of Shakespeare at Sadler’s Wells myself last

week, and I’m bound to say ’twas a bit thick—though splendidly acted,

mind you.”

“You needn’t tell me that. Phelps!” He smacked his fleshy lips

voluptuously. “Lord! What a job that man had to clear out the

beer-sellers, babies, and filthy-mouthed roughs, and now it’s the

quietest show in London. What was the piece?”

“Can’t remember the name—about a nigger.”

“_Othello?_”

“That’s it—sounded a rather Irish name for a nigger I thought.”

“Irish? Ah, yes—ha, ha, ha! You had me there! By Jove, that’s a new

wheeze!” And he roared genially, while the innocent, and it is to be

feared sadly illiterate, Will tried to look like a successful humorist.

“Anyhow,” he said, “you won’t get ’em from Little Bradmarsh, no, nor

Long Bradmarsh either. They think all actors are wicked.”

“And so they be!” burst forth the Deacon at last. “Hobs and jills ought

to be kept apart!” He stuck his knife towards the poster. “_The High

Road to Marriage_, indeed! High road to Hell!”

“Hear, hear,” agreed the Showman surprisingly, rattling his glass. “Well

put, old cock. But these ain’t actors; only puppets. You can’t be wicked

in wood.”

“I’m afraid I must be off,” said Will, rising.

“Then here’s luck to you.” He finished his glass. “And may you die

before you’re buried!”

“Thanks, I hope I shan’t do either, Mr. Duke.” He took his hat and

stick.

“Not Duke, old man. Flippance, Anthony Flippance, universally docked to

Tony Flip. Duke only goes with the Marionettes. I bought ’em lock,

stock, and barrel—-the oldest circuit in East Anglia, and the name

going well with the crowned heads.”

“But there are no crowned heads in America,” said Will, smiling.

“Pardon me, sonny,” contradicted Mr. Flippance.

“But I’ve just come from there,” said Will crushingly.

“And how about the Emperor of Brazil?”

“Oh!” said Will blankly. He seemed really to have heard of this

personage. Then recovering, he said: “But have you played before him?”

“That’s not my affair,” said Mr. Flippance. “It ain’t my responsibility

what Duke’s done or left undone—if Duke was his name, which I take

leave to question. ’Twixt you and I, I doubt if it would pay to work

Brazil. But, as I said, I bought it as a going concern, lock, stock——”

“And lies,” snapped the Deacon.

Mr. Flippance turned his large red face benevolently towards the

moleskins.

“Lies is a harsh word. Legends, old cock, legends.”

“Oi bain’t a bird,” rasped the Deacon. “Stick to the truth.”

“Lord love us, a Quaker!” Mr. Flippance winked at Will, who smiled—man

of the world to man of the world. “As if anybody would take a thing that

size and smell for a rooster!”

The Deacon reached for the rum-bottle in deadly silence. Will, with a

fear—soon proved superfluous—that he meant it for a missile, hastened

to remark that anyhow there were no crowned heads in Australia.

“Where were you educated, sonny?” retorted Mr. Flippance. And he began

whistling the then favourite air: “The King of the Cannibal Islands.” He

broke off to point out that kings and queens were as thick in the

man-eating islands round Australia as old cocks in Essex, though they

didn’t wear moleskins, or indeed anything but their own skins. Besides,

he added as an afterthought, wasn’t Queen Victoria monarch of Australia

too?

Will, taken aback again, had to admit it. “But you haven’t played before

Victoria?” he murmured.

Mr. Flippance winked more widely as he explained that a study of the

posters would show that the Marionettes themselves never claimed to have

performed before crowned heads. It was the plays that had been

performed. He turned suddenly upon the rum-soothed Deacon. “You’re not

denying, my Quaker friend, that Queen Victoria’s seen _Hamlet_?”

“You leave me and the Queen out of it,” growled the Deacon.

“Ha! Then you admit she’s seen _Hamlet_?”

“Oi don’t know nawthen about it. Why _should_ she see _Hamlet_?”

“Because he was the Prince of Denmark,” said Tony, winking again at his

now bosom friend. “But you Methody Quaker dead-alive go-to-meeting sons

of Sundayfied slugs crawl about thinking yourselves holier than

Victoria, God bless her, even when it’s wood, never having seen society

or ever had a drink outside Chipstone.”

The Deacon was roused at last. “Never had a drink outside Chipstone!”

His breast heaved with a sinister movement—was it a wheeze of wrath or

of laughter? “Oi’ll goo bail my round is bigger nor yourn. There ain’t

scarce a barn in East Anglia what don’t know me.”

Tony’s great jaw fell. “A barnstormer! You! Rats! What do you play?”

“It ain’t play—it’s work.”

“Yes, I know—but what’s your repertory?”

“My what?”

“Your pieces.”

“Oi bain’t onny a piece-worker.”

“In what?”

“In what you said. It ain’t always per tail.”

“Retail, do you mean?” said the puzzled Tony.

Will, who had listened to the conversation with an ever-expanding grin,

here burst into a guffaw. Tony turned on him.

“Is he kidding me?” he asked half angrily, half amicably.

The answer—like Will’s departure from this enthralling parlour—was

staved off by the advent of yet another head popped into the doorway.

This time it was a heavily greased head with scrupulously parted hair,

and was attached to a spruce young man with a spring posy in his

buttonhole. But his bear’s-grease out smelt his primroses.

“Hullo, Tony!” cried the aromatic apparition. “Up already!”

“_I’ve_ got to work for my living,” Mr. Flippance retorted. “The

dormouse season is over. You coming in, Charley, to see the show

to-night?”

“Me! I’ve got better things to do, old boy.” The young landlord turned

to the Deacon. “Can you let me have five or six live ’uns?”

The Deacon shook his head. “Oi don’t want to disoblige brother. Oi do my

duty according to Peter—‘nat’ral brute beasts made to be taken and

destroyed’—but they bain’t meant by the Almoighty to be taken for

sport, and Oi don’t howd with fox-hunting neither.”

“So I see.” Mr. Charles Mott glanced glumly at the backs of the

pictures.

“Ef you want to be riddy o’ warmints, shoot ’em, says Oi, or nip their

brushes in traps.”

“Oh, oh!” came involuntarily from Will at this blasphemy. The Deacon

transfixed him with his glittering eye, but went on without pausing:

“And ef you want to be riddy o’ rats, come to me. Don’t set

a-worshippin’ your prize-terriers, like Ephraim jined to his idols.”

“I did come to you to be rid o’ the warmints, and now I want

half-a-dozen spunky ’uns. Make your own price, but if you won’t supply

’em I’ll get ’em from Bill Nutbone.”

“That’s doubly sinful—to goo to the heathen.” He turned to Will. “Ef

you’re so fond o’ ferrets, young man, Oi could spare you this

pair—cheaper than you’ll get ’em from Nutbone.” He let their pink eyes

protrude from his pockets.

Will eagerly closed with the offer. If Frog Farm proved as dull as he

was now beginning to fear—after this contrast of Anthony Flippance and

Joshua Mawhood—ratting or rabbiting might be a providential diversion.

“But I can’t carry them in _my_ pockets,” he said impressively. “Just

made by Moses & Son, London. And I’ve got a long walk. Besides, I’d like

them in cages.”

“Oi’ll send ’em by the carrier on Friday,” promised the ratcatcher.

“Frog Farm, you said. Good day to you, Brother Mott.”

“Good day, Deacon. Sorry we can’t do business. Queer old cuss,” he said,

winking at Will as the door closed. “Belongs to the Peculiars.”

“I—I’ve heard of them.” Will coloured a bit.

Tony, who had listened to the dialogue with enlightenment, here stalked

out in half-genuine horror: “Holy Moses & Son! The publican and sinner

prefers rats to Shakespeare!”

“Stow it, Tony!” called the landlord after him. “One preacher’s enough.”

And, smiling, he changed the blanks into hunting pictures almost as

deftly as his waiter would have done it.

He had scarcely effected the transformation, however, before the Deacon

popped his head in again. Mr. Mott looked like a caught schoolboy, but

though the beady eyes looked straight at the flamboyant hunters, Mr.

Mawhood only said: “Oi forgot to lend a law-book.”

“What sort of a law-book d’ye want?”

“Miss Gentry’s got a counter-claim. Ef Oi won’t pay for my wife’s silk

dress as Oi never ordered, she says my ferrets killed her chickens.”

“That’s not a counter-claim, Mr. Mawhood,” advised Will.

“It’s a lyin’ claim, anyways. What killed her chickens was her own black

devil, Squibs. Her and her angels!”

“You go down to the bar and see if the missus can find you a book—but

wouldn’t a lawyer be better?”

“The good Lord forbid! Oi’d sooner goo to a doctor. Well, thank you

kindly, brother—one good turn desarves another. Foive, Oi think you

said.”

“Or six. First thing in the morning. Spunky ’uns, remember.”

The Deacon sighed and disappeared again.

“Poor old chap!” Sure of his rats, Mr. Mott was now touched to sympathy.

“His missus is a Tartar, no mistake. Still with them rounds of his, he

dodges her a good deal.” And he sighed like the Deacon and followed

him—bear’s-grease after aniseed—and Will, alone at last, followed too,

though without a sigh, being still—as the waiter said—“one of the

lucky ones.”

In the corridor he turned the wrong way, finding bedroom doors instead

of the staircase. He paused a moment to gaze at a stuffed specimen of

the sacred animal that stood with brush rampant against a scenic

background under a glass case, and a stuffed trout that swam movelessly

through a mimic stream. Then he became aware to his surprise that Tony

Flip, still in his dressing-gown and still hugging the balance of his

posters, was pacing the corridor restlessly, like a caged lion, though

it turned out to be really like a tame creature denied his cage.

“They won’t let me in,” he said miserably. And he indicated an open

bedroom door opposite the fox, with a view of housemaids at work, angry

at the hour. One was making his bed, thumping it viciously; another

raised swirls of dust with a broom. Slops stood blatantly around.

“They won’t even take free seats,” he groaned.

VII

“What did I tell you?” said Will.

“Oh, it ain’t because they think it wicked, the hussies. They turn up

their noses at it, just because it’s _under_ their noses. If they had to

go to Greenwich Fair to see it, they’d fight to get in. Candidly, cocky,

have you ever seen a better bill?”

“It seems only too much,” ventured Will.

“It don’t say all at the same performance. In practice it all comes down

to _The Mistletoe Bough_, the silliest of the lot, a bride who shuts

herself in a chest for fun, you know, and moulders into a spirit. But

think of Richardson’s—what they cram into twenty-five minutes! You saw

that at Greenwich, I suppose, Easter time.”

“No, I only got to London in time for the Great Exhibition.”

“You’ve been to that?” The Showman’s eyes sparkled.

“What I came back for.”

“That’s a Show!!” And a note of immeasurable envy mixed with the rapture

of the rival impresario. “But what a chance missed!”

“How so?”

“No drinks.”

“I got lemonade.”

“That’s not a drink—that’s a gas. Lord, I thought, looking at that

bumper house, with a proper Christian bar, they could pay off the

National Debt.”

“You’ve seen it then?”

“Was there at the opening. Stood so near the Royal Party I patted the

head of little Wales, and the Goldstick and Chamberlain walking

backwards from the Presence nearly shoved me into the Chinese Ambassador

just as he was salaaming on his stomach. Didn’t little Albert Edward

look sweet in his Highland costume?”

“I wasn’t inside then,” confessed Will, “and I only had eyes for the

Queen and her cream-coloured horses. You’ve got a season ticket, I

suppose.”

“With the Prince Consort’s compliments. The fact is, I supplied the

elephant for the Queen’s howdah.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, didn’t you see it in the Indian compartment? They wanted to show

off the magnificent trappings she got from the Rajah, and they thought

of getting a real live elephant, which would have been no end of trouble

amid all those precious vases. But I happened to know of a stuffed

elephant at a show down here in Essex, so I entered into correspondence

with Buckingham Palace and loaned the beast for the season—buying him

up first, of course—and sent him up in my caravan that had to be roused

from its winter sleep and completely unpacked. Yes, trouble enough! But

talk of the Koh-i-noor, that elephant’ll be worth his weight in gold

when he comes back—Queen Victoria’s elephant as visited by the nobility

and gentry of the world. I annex the Great Exhibition. See!”

“I wish I’d noticed him,” said Will wistfully. “I only saw her statue in

zinc, seven yards high. But there’s so much to see—machinery and jewels

and Mexican figures, it makes your head ache, and I couldn’t even get a

look at that Koh-i-noor, such a crush round it. But did you see the

Preserved Pig?”

The Showman’s eyes twinkled. “Mr. Woods, d’ye mean?”

“Mr. Woods?”

“The Chancellor of the Exchequer. Haven’t you noticed how they’ve left

off abusing the income tax now they’ve got the show to talk about? By

Jove,” he chuckled, “what a haul for the Exchequer if they bring the

Crystal Palace under the window tax!”

“No, no! Best Berkshire breed. The real marvel of the Exhibition! None

o’ your stuffed creatures, but a natural pig cured whole. Weighs three

and a half hundredweight; five foot and a half from tail to snout. ’Twas

done by a provision merchant in Dublin—Smith—I took note of the name.”

“That name will be immortal,” said Mr. Flippance gravely.

“Yes, and there was a monster pigeon-pie!” said Will with the same

unsuspicious enthusiasm.

The church clock, striking four at this point, made the Showman bound

frantically to his doorway. “Not done yet, you snails and sluts! When am

I to get these bills to the tent? Do you realize we open to-night?

You’ll ruin the show.”

“I’ll take them,” volunteered Will. “My road lays by the field.”

“A friend in need is a friend indeed.” Tony thrust the heavy roll

effusively into Will’s hands. “Ask for my daughter—she’ll help you to

stick ’em up on the bill-boards.”

“Your daughter?” murmured Will. He would have resented his sudden

reduction to a bill-poster but for the romantic vision of the Bohemian

petticoat.

“I can’t pull the strings on both sides of the stage at once, can I? Not

to mention the women’s and boys’ voices, and the piping Gaffers. Lord,

she’s got a head on her, has Polly. And pops in and out to play the

piano too.”

With pleasant flutterings of the springtide fancy, the young man lightly

strode with his roll under his arm to the field where a long

chocolate-coloured caravan—apparently the vehicle that had transported

the elephant—stood horseless at an aperture in the mammoth mushroom

described by Tony Flip. Labourers in shirt-sleeves were carrying in

ropes and rough benches. Small boys and large dogs stood around, and

there was a litter of straw, cardboard, shivered packing-cases, and

dirty paper. Two trucks covered with tarpaulin, and a vast box with a

high-pitched roof marked “Duke’s Marionettes,” completed the confusion.

Will, peeping in, saw a stage already set, at the border of which a girl

on her knees was tacking a row of tin footlight-holders. The rear was

already roped off, and the benches seemed to rise like a gallery.

Evidently the thing was done in style—crowned heads or no crowned

heads. Not without a thrill he walked in, and across the grassy floor,

but romance fled when the girl, raising her head, presented a face

almost as massive as her father’s, and ravaged by smallpox to boot.

Polly had indeed “a head on her,” he thought, though long pendent

ear-rings preserved its femininity.

Politely concealing his chill, he murmured “Miss Flippance,” and

explained he had been instructed to deliver the bills to her.

She received them and him with an indifference that would have been

galling had she been prettier, and was not gratifying even from a

massive brain.

“Silly nonsense!” she grumbled, unrolling them. “To open before you’ve

done your posting and circularizing. There won’t be a soul!”

“Oh, surely—this weather!” he murmured.

Miss Flippance threw him an annihilating glance. “If dad once gets an

idea into his head, you can’t get it out with a forceps.” Will stared at

this vigorous young lady, who, with a poster unfurled in her hand,

proceeded to yell directions and rebukes at the bench-arranging

clodhoppers. It was an insult to his sex, he felt resentfully. No woman,

however ugly, had the right to order men about, men who were not even

married to her.

“Nincompoops! They’ll never be ready for to-night,” said Miss Flippance,

acknowledging his existence again. “Would to heaven dad had gone up to

London to see the Exhibition—and not hustled us like this.”

“But he was there at the opening.”

Miss Flippance stared at him. “Were you with him?”

“No such luck. I didn’t even see the stuffed elephant.”

“Has he stuffed you with that?” Miss Flippance emitted a mirthless

laugh, and Will looked at once angry and sheepish. “Not that way, you

hulking brutes! Turn ’em round. . . . And besides, it’s ridiculous to

give _Hamlet_. High art don’t take south of Scarborough.”

“Well, I saw _Othello_ in London last week,” he contradicted

sharply—she should see he was no mere gull: “And the pit was packed.”

“Yes—in April. But try it in the dog-days.”

“Too warm, eh?” he sniggered. She turned away as from an idiot. That

hurt him more than having swallowed her father’s royal rodomontade. Did

she then think the plot of _Othello_ glacial? Or had she no sense of

humour? Yes, that was it—the sex had been denied the sense of humour.

True, it shrieked with laughter if you tickled it, but the tickling must

be physical. Ah, she was at it again, bustling and bullying the superior

sex. Well, _he_ wasn’t going to paste bills under her. Let that lazy

liar of a Showman do his own dirty work.

“Good afternoon,” he called out huffily, and walked out of the great

tent in a far less romantic mood than when he had entered it. And then,

as he came through the opening in the canvas, his eyes nearly started

out of their sockets: Daniel Quarles’s cart stood outside the tent, and

there, perched on the driving-board, holding the reins, and calmly

instructing the shirt-sleeved yokels to deliver the big drum to Miss

Flippance, was the girl of the parcel-shed!

VIII

Before his eyes could return normally to their orbits or his breath to

his windpipe, the incredible vision had vanished. Jinny had, in fact,

had an overdose of commissions in the other purlieus of Chipstone, and

having fetched the drum from its winter quarters as directed by Miss

Polly Flippance that noon—it had, in fact, been pawned, and the piano

was still irredeemable—she was hastening on her homeward circuit as

fast as Methusalem could be induced to go.

“Who was that?” Will gasped.

The rustic who had received the drum looked at him with unconcealed

contempt. A man who did not know that!

“That war Jinny!” he said.

It was as if he had given his drum a terrific bang. Jinny?—Jinny

Quarles then! Who else? In the boom of that name reverberated a clamour

of memories and of emotions, old and new. Images of a solemn-eyed mite,

of a merry little maid, of a sedate Sunday scholar, and of the amazing

creature of to-day, went all interflashing with one another. Yes, the

little Jinny who had shared the wagon and his secret with him that

fateful Sunday, and who if ever by a rare chance she had flitted across

his thoughts, figured always as this same little girl in her grand pink

Sunday pelisse, trimmed with pink velvet and fringes, was now grown up;

bonneted, bewitching, incredible.

“But where—where was her grandfather?” he stammered. “Asleep inside?”

“Asleep?” The rustic grinned. “A long sleep, Oi should reckon. Whoy, we

ain’t seen the Gaffer for years.”

“Don’t stand there gossiping.” It was the female martinet at her

sternest.

“It’s not his fault,” said Will. “I was asking about old Daniel Quarles.

Is he really dead?”

“Dead? Not to my knowledge. At least I have never noticed Jinny in

black.”

“Then where _is_ he? Why isn’t he looking after Jinny?”

“Eh? But he must be a hundred!”

“You don’t mean to say he lets Jinny go out and do his job?”

“The most natural person I should think,” said Miss Flippance. “Really I

haven’t time to discuss village carriers, if the show is to open

to-night. . . . Do be careful of that drum. No, not inside, blockhead.

Come back!”

As the tambour-laden slave did not seem to hear, his affrighted

fellow-serfs yelled to him to bring the drum outside again, and when he

was come, the despot’s skirts rustled majestically back into the

tent—they were long and hunched out quite fashionably, which

accentuated the humiliation of the male element. But Will remained at

the tent door, like Abraham after an angel’s visit, thunderstruck and

dumbfounded, but with consternation, not reverence. It was, he thought,

the grossest carelessness that had ever occurred in the history of the

globe. A respectable girl like that—why, what was the world coming to?

Sent gadding about the country like a trollop, perched up horsily behind

a carter’s whip—this was what little Jinny had been allowed to grow up

into! And that girl at “The Black Sheep”—she who had looked so

innocent, whom he had mentally seen as a May Queen, crowned with

garlands, dancing girlishly round a Maypole—this was what lay under her

poetic semblance. And at the same time—pleasing and perturbing

thought—both the unsexed Carrier and the maidenly May Queen were in

reality little Jinny: no stand-offish stranger, needing deferential

approach, but—in a way—his very own: the meek poppet whose cheek he

had always pinched patronizingly, in whose eyes he had always seen

himself as a grown-up god.

Miss Flippance, sweeping out again, and finding him still hanging about,

immovable, had a new thought. “Pardon me—has my father engaged you?”

He coloured up in anger. “I brought his bills in passing—that’s all.”

“Oh, I thought you might be looking for a job. There’s this drum, you

know.”

He could have knocked her down. But she was evidently quite in earnest,

this outrageous, humourless female, only second in self-sufficiency to

Jinny the Carrier. The world seemed suddenly emasculated.

“I’m no musician,” he said surlily.

“But you look a strong young man and it’s muscle we want, not music.

You’d only have to stand here about half an hour a day. This afternoon,

of course, you might join the Bellman round the town—I’ve ordered him

for five.”

“Miss Flippance,” said Will, mastering himself and speaking with

crushing dignity, “have you observed my clothes?”

“They don’t matter,” she assured him. “We provide the uniform.”

“Do I look,” he snorted, “like a drummer at a dime show?”

“If you’ve come as a walking gentleman,” replied Miss Flippance simply,

“you’ve come to the wrong shop. We’re only wires.”

“Oh, I know all about that.” And he slashed savagely with his stick at

the insulting tambour, which uttered a bass roar of agony.

“Splendid! But you might have smashed it!” cried Miss Flippance.

“Where’s the drumstick?”

“Am I the drumstick’s keeper?” he answered, with an odd Biblical

reminiscence.

“Nincompoops! Thickheads! Zanies! Where’s the drumstick?”

But nobody had seen the drumstick. Jinny hadn’t brought it, the slaves

assured her. She assured them, still more emphatically, that they had

dropped it off the drum in taking it out. And no inch of it being

visible where the cart had stood, she drew the deduction that it was now

speeding towards Long Bradmarsh.

She turned to Will. “Do run after her—the men are so busy—she can’t be

far, and she has to stop every now and again.”

He glared at her. Then something inside him whispered that that was the

obvious thing to do—impishly to pretend to obey her, and then to keep

her waiting for the drumstick—eternally. Yes, he would be revenged on

behalf of his sex.

“Yoicks! Tally-ho!” he cried with an advent of glee that he felt

justifiably malicious. And, waving his own stick wildly, he bounded with

mock frenzy towards the field gate by which the cart had gone off.

“You won’t catch her like that,” bawled Miss Flippance after him.

“Across the fields! Head her off!” But he would not take orders from any

woman, he told himself, so feigning deafness he ran doggedly into the

Long Bradmarsh road, and turning a sharp elbow, felt his heart leap up

to see the now familiar cart at a standstill before a wayside cottage.

But even as he gazed it started afresh.

He tore on madly. The back of the tilt vanished round another bend.

“Following a drumstick” passed grotesquely across his mind. What an odd

home-coming! What a queer renewal of acquaintance with Jinny—after that

solemn oath-taking in the wagon!

Presently he heard a wild scampering through the bushes on his right,

and his canine friend of the inn was leaping and frisking and joyously

barking beside him. They ran together—owing to the dog’s leisurely

tangents and curvatures he could just keep up with it. But with the

sweat now pouring from his forehead, the inner imp began asking what he

was running for, since he had already deceived and chastised Miss

Flippance, left her eternally expectant. Why not now drop into the

pleasant saunter home he had planned?

But the poor dog was panting in this heat—he answered the imp—it must

have run miles since its meal in the parlour. Apoplexy threatened

perhaps, hydrophobia even. Look at its lolling tongue! He snatched it

up: it must be restored to its inconsiderate mistress, to whom, at the

same time, a still more important rebuke could be administered, if

indeed any vestiges of decency yet remained in the minx. But the little

terrier struggled spasmodically in his arms—the ungrateful brute! He

must save it from itself, then, just as he must save its mistress from

herself. Clamping it to his breast with iron muscles, he toiled

frenziedly forwards. Then the far, faint sound of a horn came like elfin

mocking laughter on the sultry air, and with a sudden convulsion the

animal wrested itself free, and Will was left hopelessly pursuing, not

the cart, but the dog. He had indeed the pleasure of seeing the former

slacken to receive the latter, but the vehicle was wafted away again so

smoothly that to the poor perspiring pedestrian Methusalem appeared in

his original Mazeppa rôle.

The chase ran along wide horizons—great ploughed lands or meadows with

grazing cattle—the level broken only by ricks, roofs, and trees, mainly

witch-elms, with a few poplars. Sometimes these elms clustered in

groves, sometimes a few helped to make the hedge-line; as often they

rose solitary in arrogant individualism. To the right was a delicious

sense of the saltings and of mewing sea-birds; and mysteriously, as in

the heart of the fields, red-brown barge sails or the tall, bare poles

of vessels could be seen upstanding. And once where the road mounted,

Will caught a glimpse of the Blackwater, and ships floating, and the

dim, blue shore beyond.

But at the top of this hill he was too breathed to continue. He sat

down, wiped his forehead, and surveyed the view; far from soothed,

however, by its simple restfulness. If only his father had come to meet

him, as his letter had requested, he thought savagely, all this wouldn’t

have happened!

IX

Anyhow there was no need to follow the glaring high road any longer. On

the left he could see the clump of Steeples Wood, and he knew that once

he had cut through that, he could find the swift field-path through

Hoppits that would save miles of the high road and not bring him out on

it till the Silverlane Pump. He strolled with a sense of relief towards

the wood, but hardly had its green groves closed refreshingly upon him

when, reminding himself he was a trespasser, he quickened his pace

again, and hurried through the oak plantations and over the wonderful

carpet of bluebells with but a slight eye to the sylvan beauty.

Even when he reached the field-path bounded by the ditch and the

dog-rose hedge, he did not relax his speed, having bethought himself

that the poor horse would surely be given drink at the trough of the

Silverlane Pump, and that there would probably be a delay at “The

Silverlane Arms,” even if he should not have succeeded in heading the

Carrier off altogether. And from that point she would surely need his

protection, so lonely was the road till you sighted Long Bradmarsh with

the drainage windmills and the bridge. And the no less necessary sermon

could be combined with the protection.

He found the wheel of the village pump chained up. Evidently the water

was running scarce. It looked not unlike a gibbet, this tall pump, and

he could imagine a criminal dangling from the spout. There was little

water in the trough, and the water-butt of the inn was almost equally

dry; a wayside mudhole haunted by geese represented a pool. He

remembered these arid villages in such strange juxtaposition with his

own oozy birthplace—was it here or at Kelcott that he had made a boyish

fortune, bringing water at a halfpenny a pint? His mother, he recalled

with a faint smile, had been against the business because Jesus had said

to the woman of Samaria “_Give_ me to drink,” though he had trumped her

text with the injunction to the Israelites: “Ye shall also buy water of

them for money.” It all made him super-conscious of thirst, and he went

into the inn, and ordering a pint of ale, inquired if the Carrier had

passed by.

“Which way be you a-gooin’?” said the tapster. It irritated him to be

questioned, and he replied tartly that he was going home. He gulped down

his liquor and put his question to a group of children playing around

the pump. They scratched their heads and gaped at him, and the youngest

put shy, chubby hands to its smeary face. “The white horse and the

girl!” he explained, and the shy child started screaming, and a woman

burst from a cottage door and dragged it within, glaring suspiciously at

the “furriner.”

A labourer riding a plough-horse barebacked, and leading another, came

from the Bradmarsh direction. “Has the Carrier passed you?” he asked.

“D’ye want a lift?” was the reply.

He lost his temper. “Haven’t you got enough business o’ your own?”

“Not much,” said the labourer naïvely. “Ground be as ’ard as the road.

Curous, baint it, arter all that soakin’.”

He replied more civilly, glad his rudeness was misunderstood. “Yes, it’s

always either too little or too much.”

“And ye can’t sow unless ’tis none-or-both,” added the philosophic

ploughman, plodding on. “Gimme a followin’ toime!”

The rustic meant a season in which rain and sunshine came in rapid

alternation, but Will ruefully reflected that the “followin’ toime,” in

the sense he was having it, was far from satisfactory.

But at that moment there was a cheerful bark, and that inconsistent dog

was curveting around him, its tall thumping wildly against his trousers

in an ecstasy of recognition. So he was too late, he thought with a

strange heart-sinking; knowing its rearguard habit. He pushed it away

with his foot. If the beast thought he was going to carry it again, it

was jolly well mistaken. No more cart-chasing for him. His “following

time” was over. And as the creature persisted in gambolling round his

legs, he made a swish in the air with his stick to drive it on its way,

and it uttered a fearsome yell; it being part of Nip’s slyness to cry

before he was hurt. But for once Nip was not a laggard, but an advance

courier, and Fate brought Methusalem round the corner at the exact

instant of his yell.

“How dare you strike my dog?” It was an inauspicious reunion. Jinny had

checked Methusalem, and her grey eyes were blazing down from their dark

lashes; her face framed in its bonnet glowed like a dark flower, and he

was confusedly aware that that lonely hamlet’s high-street was suddenly

pullulating with people—the tapster and gapers at the inn door, the

ploughman looking backwards, excited at last, the little children

mysteriously out again with their mother, and other mothers and infants

(in arms or at skirt) surging agitatedly from nowhere, whether at Nip’s

cry or Jinny’s. Even the pump seemed to have spouted an old man, while

an old lady arose, like an ancient Venus, from the pond. And every eye,

he felt, was stabbing at the maltreator of Jinny’s animal; the cackle

seemed a sinister clamour as of vengeance mounting from that swarm of

sympathizers.

“I didn’t strike him,” he answered sulkily. Clearly she had not

recognized him—a position not without its advantages. Doubtless the raw

youth of her childish memories was effectually buried beneath this manly

form, set off by the elegant London suit, this well-barbered head, and

the face that had exchanged freckles for the stamp of experience. “As a

matter of fact,” he added, “I fed the brute at the inn.”

“Which brute?” retorted Jinny sharply. But at this moment Nip, who had

been calmly lapping the dregs of the pool, intervened by leaping up to

lick Will’s hand.

“I beg your pardon,” she murmured, coming to a standstill.

“Granted,” he said, not to be outdone in graciousness, and beginning to

enjoy the advantage her ignorance of his identity gave him. “But that’s

no proof I haven’t beaten him. You remember the saying:

_A woman, a dog, and a walnut-tree,_

_The more you beat them, the better they be._”

“That’s all nonsense,” said Jinny, bridling up again.

He changed the subject quickly. “Have you got a drumstick?”

“Gracious! Do you want to try?”

He laughed. “It’s for the drum at the show. Miss Flippance thinks you

didn’t deliver it.”

“Why, it was tied on the drum. The fool of a man must have dropped

it—if he hasn’t poked it inside the drum. Did you look under the

benches?”

“No. That’s it! I remember now seeing the man take the drum inside by

mistake. He must have dropped it on the way back.”

“Don’t you think it would have been more sensible to look before you

leaped—especially such a long leap! And what a pace you must have come

in this heat!”

He flushed faintly. “I’m a good walker. I know the cuts.”

“Well, if you get back as quick as you came, there won’t be much time

lost.” She clucked up Methusalem. “Good afternoon—hope you’ll find your

stick, and that you’ll drum-in a good house.”

What! She too thought him capable of being a drum-banger, a minion of

marionettes. Had women then no eye—no perception of clothes—as well as

no humour? The mob was melting away under their amiable parley, but he

now rallied it afresh: “Stop!” he called desperately after Jinny.

“Stop!”

But Nip’s joyous bark at the resumption of the journey drowned all

lesser remarks, and again the cart receded on the horizon—an horizon he

knew houseless and arid, no region for a lonely, good-looking girl. Let

poor pockmarked Polly Flippance brave the wild, if female carriers there

must be: not his Jinny. No, he must reveal himself at the next stop, he

must remonstrate, protest.

But the trouble was that the thing would not stop, and that there would

be no stop now—he knew—for several miles. Perspiring, panting,

hallooing and waving his stick and utterly oblivious of the scandalized

street, he pursued at his swiftest, and Methusalem being no serious

competitor in the long run, Jinny heard him at last, and looking back

through the tilt over the dwindled packages, saw the pitiful, gesturing

figure, and to his infinite relief the cart drew up.

“What have you lost now?” she called. “Your sandwich-boards?”

“I’m not going back to Miss Flippance,” he panted, “I’m going Bradmarsh

way.”

“Then why ever didn’t you say so?” she replied calmly. “Jump up!”

Jump up? She asked a strange young man to jump up? Then what else could

she have done if he had said who he was—a fact of which he had indeed

been just about to make royal proclamation.

“You take passengers?” he gasped. He remembered now that Joey had told

him the cart would take him, but then he had had no idea that “her” was

not the vehicle.

She was equally surprised: “Why else did you run after me?”

Run after her? He did not like the phrase. Girls ran after men—girls of

a sort—to some extent girls of every sort: that was the doctrine in

_his_ set. And yet he _had_ run after her—it called for explanation. “I

wasn’t running after you,” he said slowly, “it was only that—that I

couldn’t believe my eyes to see you like that.”

“Like what?” She was frankly puzzled.

“Driving about alone in this God-forsaken part. It’s—” scandalous, he

was about to say, but before the glimmering fire in her eyes he altered

the word—“it’s dangerous.”

“Dangerous!” Her little laugh rippled out. “I thought you said you knew

these parts.”

“So I do—I’m an Essex man, even though I mayn’t look it, having been

half round the world.”

“Have you now? Well, it’s the big cities that are dangerous, Gran’fer

says.”

“Maybe he’s right,” he admitted, wincing a little before the candid grey

eyes. “But don’t you understand that a woman carrier is—” again he

toned down his word—“outlandish.”

Her amusement danced in her eyes. “Inlandish, I suppose you mean.”

“Don’t laugh,” he said, forgetting that the unrevealed Will had no right

to that tone. “You know it’s an unwomanly occupation.”

“Laughing?”

“You know what I mean. For one thing a woman can’t know much about

horses—and she oughtn’t to have to do with ’em anyhow—it’s not

natural.”

“May she have to do with donkeys?” Jinny inquired sweetly.

He frowned. “Chaff’s no good.”

“But I never give my horse any—do I, Methusalem dear?”

Such word-mockery was bewildering to his simpler brain. He opened his

mouth, but nothing came, and his vexation only increased for finding no

vent.

“May she have to do with pigs?” queried Jinny again.

“Pigs are at home,” he conceded.

“Not always,” she said demurely. “I meet lots on this very road.”

“And you might meet worse than pigs on a lonely road like this—you

might meet men——”

“Like I’ve met one now.”

“Yes, but it happens to be me!” he said, again all but forgetting her

ignorance of his identity. “Usually it would be dangerous.”

“Well, but wouldn’t it be just as dangerous for a male carrier?”

“Not at all. He can fight.”

“And if he met a woman?” she said slyly.

“There’s no danger in a woman.”

“Then why are you running away from Miss Flippance?”

“Miss Flippance!” he cried in angry astonishment. “Who says I’m running

away from Miss Flippance?”

“Well, you’ve run from her to me. And if you say you weren’t running

after me, you must have been running away from her.”

“Don’t you try to bamboozle me. I tell you I’ve been half round the

world, and nowhere have I seen a woman carrier.”

“If you’d ha’ stayed at home you would have,” said Jinny.

“So it seems. And in America there are those Bloomerites—come over

here, too, I hear, nowadays, the hussies. Want to wear the breeches.”

“Do they?” inquired Jinny with genuine interest. “I’ve often thought it

would be more convenient for me jumping up and down, and there would be

yards of stuff less. Some of those Chipstone ladies quite scavenge the

streets with their long skirts, padded out by all those petticoats,

don’t you think?”

He grew almost as auburn as his hair: such secrets of the toilette,

babbled by a young girl he still thought good at heart, outraged his

sense of decorum.

“No, I don’t think!” he answered angrily.

“Well, try,” she suggested sweetly. “Put yourself into our place.”

“It’s you putting yourselves into _our_ place that’s the trouble,” he

retorted. “What will women be up to next, I wonder.”

Here it was Jinny’s turn to flare up. She had never—it has been already

remarked—thought of herself as up to anything, rarely even thought of

herself as a woman, least of all as a representative of her sex. But

challenged now to her face for the first time, she felt she must hold

the pass for all womanhood.

“We women will be up to whatever we please.”

“Not if you want to please the men.”

Jinny’s young face flashed fire and roses. “And who wants to please the

men?”

He laughed complacently. “I never met a woman who didn’t.”

The girl’s fire died into cold contempt. “I don’t think you know much

about women.”

“Me? Why, I’ve knocked about since you were in pinafores—and pelisses!”

“I shouldn’t be surprised, Mr. Drummer,” said Jinny with judicial

frigidity, “if you knew less about women than I know about horses.”

“I’ve seen half the world, I tell you.”

She flicked up Methusalem. “But not the better half.”

He winced again. “Fiddlesticks!” was all he could find to answer.

“Drumsticks!” rejoined Jinny gaily, and with a mocking flourish of her

horn, she receded afresh.

Something stronger than his will now shot him forward crying: “I say,

Jinny!” He meant by crying that old familiar name to disclose himself,

and then to have it out with her, side by side on the driving-board.

She turned her head. “_Do_ you want to jump on or don’t you?” she

called.

It was the last straw. Jinny—he had forgotten—-was not a name

privileged for the friend of her pelisse and pinafore days: any male

might use it, just as any wayside rough might abuse its owner. “I

don’t,” he shouted savagely. “I’ll never patronize a woman carrier.”

“_A dashing young lad from Buckingham!_” She had started singing,

whether to herself or at him, he could not tell, and he strode behind

the cart almost as rapidly as Methusalem before it, to find out whether

she was still answering back.

But apparently she had forgotten him—that was the most pungent repartee

of all—and the gaiety of the chorus only added salt to the smart:

“_Still he’d sing fol de rol iddle ol,_

_Still he’d sing fol de rol lay——_”

The thin silver treble reminded him incongruously of her Sunday-school

singing, and the revival of that long-faded picture of himself driving

her home only emphasized the jarring present. He turned furiously down

Plashy Walk, where the rollick of the chorus soon ceased to penetrate

and the white fragrance of the wonderful hawthorn avenue made a soothing

passage-way. His tongue felt acrid with anger, ale, and running, and

Frog Farm, with the faces of his parents, now began to loom more

emotionally before him, because of the tea as well as the tenderness

awaiting him. For neither of these luxuries was likely to be absent,

even if his letter—or his father—had gone astray. Let her protect

herself, this minx of a carrier, Time’s odd changeling for his sober

little Jinny. Serve her right if some horrid instrument of fate should

take down her pride!

By the time he had come through the mile of hawthorn, and defied the

Plashy Hall dog with his stick, she had passed out of his thoughts, and

his indignation against her had changed to indignation against the

impudent attempt—obvious from the notice-boards—to deny him and the

public this old-established right-of-way. Things would not have got even

thus far had _he_ remained in Little Bradmarsh, he was thinking, and he

was already brooding over a plan of campaign as he was climbing over the

stile back into the high road. And then his vaulting leg remained

suspended an instant in air in sheer astonishment. Jinny was facing him

from her perch of vantage, smiling sweetly from her witching bonnet, her

cart athwart the road, in fact he could hardly step off the stile

without treading on Methusalem’s toes. Relaxing his motion, he sat down

on the stile, staring at her.

X

“Why, Will!” exclaimed Jinny, and there was now a strange softness in

her face and voice. “How stupid of me not to recognize you when I’ve got

your box all the time!”

His mind, still perturbed about the right-of-way, and bent now upon

home, could not adjust itself so suddenly to the new situation. Again

his mouth opened without issue. Her smile faded.

“I’m Daniel Quarles’s granddaughter,” she said with a little quaver.

“Little Jinny of Blackwater Hall.”

“So you’ve remembered me at last!” His voice came out harsh, though

inwardly he was melted by this new sweetness.

“Then did you know _me_ all the time?”

“Of course—the moment I clapped eyes on you.” He was not consciously

romanticizing.

“That’s what I’ve been thinking as I waited here for you. I’m so glad.

Because that shows you were only teasing me, saying all those horrid

things.” Then a new thought struck her to self-mockery. “Of course—I’m

getting silly—it wasn’t so wonderful of you recognizing me, with the

name of Daniel Quarles on the cart.” And she laughed merrily. “Do you

know why I didn’t recognize _you_? It wasn’t only Miss Flippance put me

off, and that I couldn’t connect you with drums and marionettes—it was

you yourself that blocked the way.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The old you, I mean—I was thinking about him all the time we were

talking, and that funny new you wasn’t like him one bit.”

“Thinking of me!” He was touched. . . . “Whatever made you think of me?”

“Didn’t I just tell you I’ve got your box? And of course I knew you were

coming back. We’ve been expecting you for days.”

“Oh, then mother did get my letter!” His latent ill-humour flowed into

the new channel.

“Of course.”

“Then why didn’t dad come to meet me?”

Her mouth twitched humorously at the corners with the suspicion the

letter was still unread, but she replied: “I suppose because he’s old

and hasn’t got a trap any more, and he knew that Tuesday was my day.

Jump up, I’m ever so late!”

He shook his head. “I can’t jump up.”

“Why, what’s the matter, Will?” Her voice was anxious and tender. “Have

you hurt your ankle, running?”

“No, no!” he said petulantly. “Didn’t you hear me say I’d never

patronize a woman carrier?”

She smiled in relief. “Yes—I heard you say it. But that was the silly

you.”

His face hardened. “Silly or sensible, I stick to my word.”

“Drumsticks!” she mocked again. “Jump up and tell me all about your

affair with Miss Flippance.”

“Don’t be saucy, Jinny. It don’t become you:”

For the life of him he could not accept her as grown up, much less as an

equal, though she sat on high, dominating the situation, whip in hand

and horn at girdle, spick and span and cool; while he, astride the

stile, was a forlorn figure, with dusty shoes and hot, lowering look.

“It becomes me as much as silliness does you,” said Jinny.

“I don’t see the silliness.”

“Why, you can’t live a week at Frog Farm without patronizing me. Who

else is there? There isn’t hardly a trap to be had even miles around.

Why there was a young man I drove out to Frog Farm last week, and a fine

to-do he had getting home!”

It was not calculated to soothe him. “And what need had you to drive a

young man?”

“It was for Maria—your mother’s pig. She was ill; her whole litter

might have been lost.”

He frowned more darkly. Pigs, he had but just admitted, might reasonably

come into the feminine ambit: still, if girls did get to know coarse

facts, they might at least have the decency not to talk about them. “And

did he call you Jinny?” he grunted.

“He didn’t call me Maria.”

“Well, traps or no traps,” he said sullenly, “you’ll get no orders from

me. I’ve fended for myself in the Canadian backwoods, where there wasn’t

even a woman to sew on buttons, and I certainly don’t need one now.”

But she was still smiling. “Do you know the song of the dashing young

lad from Buckingham?”

“I know _you_ do. But what’s that to do with it?”

She re-started the merry tune, but markedly altered the words:

“_A dashing young lad from—Canada,_

_Once a great wager did lay_

_That he’d never use Jinny the Carrier,_

_But—he gave her an order straightway!_”

“No, he won’t.”

“Don’t interrupt. You’ve already given it.

_But still he’d sing fol de rol iddle ol——_”

“_What_ order have I given you?”

“To carry your box, of course—

_Still he’d sing fol de-rol lay——_”

“But that was before I had the ghost of an idea——”

“Do join in the chorus:

_Still he’d sing fol de rol iddle ol——_”

“I’ll have my trunk at once!” he cried furiously, and sprang off the

stile.

“_Fol de rol arilol lay!_” she wound up with easy enjoyment.

“Give me my trunk,” he commanded again.

“What—on this lonely road—in this weather!”

“That’s my business!”

“No, it isn’t—it’s mine.” She touched up Methusalem and turned his

eager nose homewards.

Will ran round with the turning animal.

“Give me my trunk!” He was white with determination.

“And don’t you call that an order?” She cracked her great whip.

He sprang to the tail-board, hanging on by one arm, and clutched at the

trunk with the other, dragging it out. But he had forgotten to reckon

with the faithful guardian. Nip, excited as at a rabbit, sprang from the

basket in which he had been resting his four weary limbs and growled

ominously, and as the burglarious arm did not draw back, the terrier—O

almost human ingratitude!—sprang at it and made his beautiful white

teeth meet in its fleshy middle.

“You little beast!” Alarmed more for his finery than his flesh, he

snatched back the elegant London sleeve and dropped off the cart, which

soon disappeared down a grim and lonely lane.

XI

He examined the wound in his coat, and finding to his relief that it

could be neatly patched up, he stripped off the garment and surveyed his

abraded skin, tooth-marked and red-flecked; Nip’s signature in blood.

Then the horrible thought of hydrophobia—he had witnessed a dreadful

case in Montreal—popped again into his mind: after all, it was as hot

as July, and no sane dog would have behaved so disgracefully! And then,

pricked up by the sound of the horn, which came vaunting and taunting

from the lane, he started running after the cart yet once more: he must

find out if the dog would drink. But even the rumbling of the vehicle

could no longer be heard, and he was slackening hopelessly when he

became aware how involuted was this lane, and that by trespassing across

a ploughed field he could gain several furlongs. Bounding over the ditch

with his coat slung over his arm, and nearly tearing it afresh in

breaking through the blackberry hedge, he ran as recklessly as a

fox-hunter across the furrows, breaking out again like a footpad when he

heard Methusalem’s leisurely trot, and catching that unreluctant animal

by the beribboned headstall. Jinny manifested no surprise.

“I thought you’d get over your silliness,” she said, smiling. “Jump up

then!”

“I’m not jumping up!” He was angrier and hotter than ever. “I’ve come to

give your dog a drink.”

“Eh? But we’ve passed ‘The Silverlane Arms.’”

“This is no joking matter. He must have water.”

“He doesn’t need any. Surely I can look after my own dog—that’s not a

man’s place, too, is it?”

“It’s not a question of that—but if he doesn’t drink, it may be fatal.”

“Nonsense. A kind cottager offered him water only a mile back—he didn’t

want it. . . . What’s the matter? You’re looking so strange. . . . Have

you had a sunstroke?” The alarm in her voice reflected the alarm in his

face, and his alarm was in turn augmented by hers. He had a weird vision

of that man in Montreal, thrown into convulsions by the sound of a

splash and trying to bite his attendants, and a ghastly memory came to

him of a Bradmarsh woman who had frizzled for her foaming child the

liver of the dog that had bitten it. “Suppose your dog should be mad?”

he asked, with white lips that already felt frothy.

“Nip? Nonsense.”

“He bit me.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. Where? Let me see.”

“I won’t.”

“But Nip never bites.”

“All the more suspicious. Try him with some water, please.”

“Where can I get water? Nip finds his own.”

“You mean to say you don’t carry water?”

“I’m not a water-carrier.”

“How can you laugh? It’s a question of life and death. Surely there must

be a pond somewhere.”

“You know there’s nothing hereabouts. Why, you used to come to Kelcott

to sell water at a halfpenny a pint. Don’t you remember? You bought me a

monkey-on-a-stick out of the profits.”

“How you babble! Then I must go in suspense?”

“Drumsticks! Here, Nip!” The dog was in her lap in a twinkling. She

pulled off her driving-glove and thrust her fingers into its mouth.

“Bite, Nip, bite.”

Will felt his first conscious flash of romance in all that fagging

chase. It was like dying together.

But Nip’s teeth refused to close on his mistress’s fingers—instead he

growled ominously at Will.

“Bite, you naughty dog!” And she pressed his reluctant teeth together.

“There!” She held down towards Will two fingers faintly ridged in red

and white. But instead of feeling a reassuring sanity, an impulse he

felt really mad streamed through his veins to seize the little fingers

in his strong hands and to pull her down from the seat of the mighty,

down towards the inner breast pocket that held his bank-notes. But his

stick and his coat and Methusalem’s bridle, all of which he was holding

simultaneously, cluttered up his hands sufficiently to clog the impulse.

“That proves nothing,” he said sulkily.

“And wasn’t he lapping at the pool after you struck him?”

“Ah, that’s true.” His face lit up.

“Then you did strike him?”

“Don’t tease. Yes, I’d forgotten, he lapped then, or rather I scarcely

noticed it.”

“I suppose you shut your eyes when going for him, just like a bull

does.”

“I didn’t go for him, I tell you. I just swished my stick.”

“Well, if you’d kept your eyes open, you’d have seen him drinking and

saved your fright.”

He was disappointed as well as irritated. “Then when you let him bite

you, you knew there was no danger.”

“There’s _never_ any danger on these roads—didn’t I tell you so? Why,

there was more danger in that monkey you gave me, for I sucked the paint

off.”

“I don’t remember giving you any monkey.”

“I didn’t want a monkey, but you _made_ me take it—like that oath in

the wagon. Perhaps you’ve forgotten that too.”

“I can remember giving you a kiss,” he jerked defiantly.

“That I can’t remember,” said Jinny quietly.

“Suppose you’ve had so many since.”

“Lots!” said Jinny. “Good-bye again, if you’re so silly. Gee up,

Methusalem!”

But he clung to the bridle and was dragged along, to Nip’s shrilled

agitation.

“Let go,” said Jinny. “Don’t be silly.”

“Not till I have my trunk.”

“That’s sillier still.”

“Give me my trunk.”

“I think you _have_ gone mad, Will.”

“That’s not your affair, Miss Quarles, I want my trunk.”

“I was ordered to deliver it at Frog Farm.”

“And I order you to deliver it to me.”

“Let go.” She cracked her whip in his direction.

“You little spitfire! If you touch me with that whip I’ll have an action

against you—as well as against your dog.”

“Let go my horse then.”

“I’m within my legal rights, as any _male_ carrier would know. I demand

my trunk.”

“And I demand my horse. Let go!”

“I won’t.” He was running along with it now, keeping pace with the

mystified Methusalem.

“Oh, Will!” she cried. “And _you_ said that on a lonely road I might

meet a man.”

“Well—you have now!” he said viciously.

“Yes—the first in all my life to give me trouble.”

That hurt worse than any whip. He loosed the festive bridle, staggering

a little, and the cart rolled past him. Only what was that little object

in the road?

Ah, in the altercation she had forgotten to put on her glove again after

that dramatic offer of her fingers to the dog—it had tumbled down.

’Twould pay her out to lose it, he thought savagely. However, he thrust

it into the inner waistcoat pocket where his paper fortune reposed so

comfortingly. But as again he saw the tail-board with his now protruding

box vanishing round a corner, a blind rage began to possess him. Surely

he was not thus entirely to be thwarted and overridden. Surely, at

least, he would not endure her actual delivery of his box at Frog Farm.

No, he must head her off again, if only outside his own gate. Across his

border a woman carrier must in no circumstances be countenanced. And

once more the unfortunate Will Flynt ploughed through the hedges and

meadows, not always remembering the prickly places; and finally chased

by a bull on which he had to turn several times with his coat and his

stick, just like a toreador; though, remembering what Jinny had just

said about the bull shutting its eyes, he dodged it at the charging

crises, and thus saved both coat and skin. But he was forced to scramble

ignominiously over a fence into the high road, still a good mile from

Bradmarsh Bridge, at the very moment the cart came clattering up.

But if Jinny had observed the Spanish bull-fight she gave no sign. What

she said, as she reined in Methusalem, was much more surprising.

“I’ve been thinking you were within your legal right, Will. I’m sorry. A

carrier must deliver goods as ordered. So if you’re still silly——!”

If she had stopped before the final clause, he might have been touched

by the unexpected surrender. As it was, he only said icily, “How much do

I owe you?”

“Sixpence,” she said as frigidly, “unless you’d like a reduction for my

not taking it all the way.”

“No, thank you.” He passed the coin, grazing her warm fingers.

“By the way, you didn’t happen to see my glove?” she said.

“Your glove?” he repeated. Why, indeed, should he fetch and carry for

her? Let her be punished for her negligence. He moved towards his box.

“Oh, well—I suppose it’ll be there on Friday,” she said. “I’m the only

person who ever goes that cut.”

“Drumsticks aren’t the only things that are dropped,” he observed

maliciously.

“No,” she agreed simply. She did not even seem to remember how she had

trounced “that fool of a _man_.” No sense of humour in the sex, he

reflected again.

“Do hold the brute!” he cried, for Nip was again showing his teeth in

defence of the box.

“If you kept off a bull, you don’t need protection against a terrier,”

she replied, and to his further amazement there was a note of admiration

in her voice.

“The weaker the thing the harder it is to fight,” he rejoined

significantly. He had his back now to the cart, and he hoisted his trunk

upon it.

“You’re not going to carry it?” There was incredulity in her voice, for

it was a box that looked nearly as long as himself.

“Who else?” He shifted the box to his right shoulder, which he had

padded with his coat.

“I thought you’d go home and get a truck or something.”

“And leave it on the road?”

“It’s just as safe as my glove.”

“There’s no safety for either,” he said oracularly, “if a man like me

comes along.” And he swaggered forwards with his huge load.

“Why, you’re as strong as the bull!” said Jinny.

“I am.” He was flattered.

“And as obstinate as a mule!”

He increased his pace.

“Good-bye, Will!”

He did not answer.

Methusalem caught him up. “Since you _are_ going to Frog Farm,” said the

Carrier, “why not take your folks’ groceries too? I don’t usually get

’em till Friday, but when I got your order to go there to-day——!”

“Why should I do your jobs?”

“Just what I told you. You can’t live a week at Frog Farm without me.”

“Give me the parcel.” His forehead was already beaded with perspiration,

but his left hand heroically held out his stick: “Slide the string on

this.”

She shook her head. “_Still he’d sing fol de rol lay_,” she trilled, and

in a minute he was hopelessly left behind. The road had already begun

the ascent towards Long Bradmarsh, but he heard her goading Methusalem

to greater efforts, as though in fear lest he should repent under the

burden of his obstinacy.

XII

As soon as she was safely out of sight, Will, breathing heavily,

slackened his showy pace, and very soon lowered his load altogether and

sat down upon it, while he wiped his streaming countenance. The physical

relief was great. A lark was singing overhead and his eyes followed it

restfully till he couldn’t tell whether the throb was singing or the

song throbbing. He must smoke his pipe by this wayside grass after all

that scurrying and squabbling. Fumbling for his matches, he felt the

bulge of the glove and softened still more. Anyhow he had been

victorious over the vixen, and he was resting on his laurels, so to

speak. Now that she realized he would never recognize her as a carrier,

he could afford to give her one of the Canadian fal-lals he had bought

at Moses & Son’s for his mother, and which now reposed in the box

arching beneath him. That would make her think he had not forgotten her

even in Canada, and anyhow it would show her he bore no malice for the

bite or even for her bark. Surveying the landscape, he recognized that

by going on a little he would strike the turning to the bridge and “The

King of Prussia,” where he might possibly find a trap. The hussy need

never know he had broken down. But as he sat there lazily smoking and

evoking his boyhood and her part therein, the best part of an hour sped

glamorously, and suddenly he saw red. Caleb Flynt, equally coatless, was

hastening from the Bradmarsh direction as fast as his aged limbs could

carry him.

“Hullo, dad!” he cried, startled. “Same old shirt!”

Caleb grinned. “Keeps her colour, don’t she?”

“But why didn’t you come to meet me?” said Will, recalling his

grievance.

“Oi did—soon as Jinny come and told us she’d passed you carrying your

chest and you might want a hand. Is that the hutch? Dash my buttons, you

must ha’ growed up like Samson! Fancy carryin’ that all the way from

Chipstone in the strong sun!”

Will did not deny the feat—the explanation would really have been too

complicated. In his embarrassment, he overlooked that his father had not

really answered his question. “And how’s mother?” he said.

“Mother’s in a great old state. ’Nation mad with Jinny.”

“Why, what’s Jinny done?”

“Sow neglectful. ‘Bein’ as you passed him by,’ says mother to she, ‘why

dedn’t you stop and pick up the chest?’”

He looked uncomfortable. “And what did Jinny say?”

“She said she dedn’t reckonize the old you when she dreft by, and

besides she was singing-like.”

He winced at the reminder of the song, but was grateful to her for

telling so truthful a lie: instinctively he felt that his folks having

accepted a woman carrier with such brainless acquiescence would fail to

enter into the fine shades of his feeling.

“Mother hadn’t a right to make a noise with Jinny,” he said.

“She only kitched of a fire for a moment. ’Twas more over you than over

Jinny, Oi should reckon. Bust into tears, she did, and when Oi said

maybe as Jinny was mistook she nearly bit my head off. ‘Too lazy-boned

to goo and give a hand to your own buoy-oy,’ says she. ‘Ain’t he shifted

for hisself nigh ten years?’ says Oi. ‘Can’t you wait ten minutes more?

Oi count he’ll be here before the New Jerusalem,’ says Oi. That dedn’t

pacify her much, bein’ a female. Cowld-blooded—she called me. ‘There’s

feythers,’ says she, ‘as ’ud be trimmed out with colours like Jinny’s

hoss—not leave it to a gal as is no relation to decorate even her dog

in his honour.’ ‘That’s for May Day,’ says Oi. ‘All wery fine,’ says

she. ‘But May Day’s over and gone six days’—she’s a rare un for figgers

is mother—‘time enough,’ says she, ‘for God to create the world in.’

‘Maybe you’d like flags flourishin’ and flutterin’, says Oi, jocoshus

like, ‘but Oi ain’t got no flags save my old muckinger.’ And with that,

bein’ more shook than I let on, Oi blowed my nose into it, wery

trumpet-like, and that seemed to quieten her, for her tantarums be over

now, and the onny noise she’s makin’ is the fryin’ o’ them little old

weal sausages for you.”

“Good!” cried the Prodigal Son, his face transfigured. “She remembered

my passion for veal sausages!”

“‘And there’s pickled walnuts too! Put them out likewise,’ says Oi, ‘for

’tis a poor heart that never rejoices.’”

“But that’s your passion, not mine.”

“That’s what mother said. ‘But baint Oi to get no compensation?’ says

Oi. And why dedn’t you write to her all these years, Willie?”

His face darkened again. “I’m no great shakes with a quill. And there

wasn’t anything to say. I did write once to tell you I was safe across

the Atlantic and was gone to make my fortune.”

“We dedn’t never get no letter.”

“No—it came back months after. I forgot to put England on it, thinking

maybe Essex was enough. But it seems there’s a Mount Essex in the

States, down Wyoming way, and the Yanks always think everything is for

them. So I thought I’d best let things be, being on the go in those

days.”

Caleb fully sympathized with the plea. “And have ye made your fortune,

Will?” he inquired meekly.

“That depends on your idea of a fortune,” Will parried. But he had a

complacent consciousness of those bank-notes behind the glove.

“My idea of a fortune be faith in God,” said Caleb.

“Yes, yes, I know.” The young man got off the box impatiently.

Caleb tugged at one of its handles.

“Lord, that’s lugsome!” he said, letting the long heavy chest subside.

“Ef you ain’t come back rich, you’ve come back middlin’ powerful. All

the way from Chipstone!” He clucked his tongue admiringly.

Having once left the miracle undenied, and feeling the situation now

altogether beyond explanation to the bucolic intellect, Will again

silently acquiesced in the Herculean imputation and took the other

handle. “But why didn’t you bring a cart or a truck?” he asked as they

began walking cumbrously towards the bridge.

“Ain’t got nowt but a wheelbarrow,” Caleb explained. “Times is

changed—-Oi ain’t looker no more, and there’s two housen now. Old

Peartree got to have a separate door, but ’twas a good bargain Oi put my

cross to with the son o’ the Cornish furriner what Oi warked for these

thirty-nine year. Mother will have it she’d ha’ made a cuter deal, she

bein’ a dapster in figgers and reckonin’ out to a day when the New

Jerusalem will be droppin’ down, but Oi don’t howd with women doin’

men’s business, bein’ as your rib can’t be your head.”

“I quite agree,” said Will, surprised to find such enlightened

sentiments in his queer old parent. “But tell me about Ben and Isaac and

the others.”

“They don’t write neither. We was lookin’ to you to tell us about the

others as went furrin. Ben should be a barber in America, and they say

as Christopher’s got a woife, colour o’ coffee.”

“Nonsense, dad!”

“Well, maybe ’twas Isaac.”

“No Flynt would marry a nigger woman,” said Will decisively.

“Oi’m right glad to hear it,” said Caleb. “For Oi count the young ’uns

’ud come out streaky and spotty like pigeons or cattle, and though they

likely turn white when they die, and their souls be white all the time,

Oi could never be comfortable along o’ finch-backed gran’childer.”

With such discourse they beguiled the heavy way, trudging behind their

tall shadows, till at the gate of the drive of Frog Farm they saw Martha

peering eagerly along the avenue of witch-elms. In another instant Will,

letting go his box-handle, was choked in her hug and wetted by her

tears.

“I can smell those sausages right here, mother,” he said, with a smile

and a half sob. “How do ye howd?” And he emphasized the homely old idiom

by patting her wrinkled cheek. She caught his hand in hers, and he was

touched by the thin worn wedding-ring on the gnarled and freckled hand.

His eyes roved round. “But surely this ain’t the house I was born in.

Why, that was a giant’s castle.”

Caleb looked a bit uneasy: “You’re sure this _be_ Will?” he asked Martha

in one of his thundrous whispers.

“Why, I’d know him in a hundred.”

“Well, there’s onny nine or ten.” And he laughed gleefully.

“Do be easy, Caleb. You’re getting as unrestful as Bundock.”

“I’m Will right enough,” Will intervened. “Only everything seems to have

got so small. Come along, dad.” He took up his side of the box:

“Gracious goodness!” cried Martha, perceiving it at last. “My poor Will!

Lugging that from Chipstone! Why didn’t you call to Jinny to stop and

take it?”

“How was I to know that that was Jinny’s cart dashing by?” he said,

moving forward quickly. “I suppose you didn’t ask her to stay for the

sausages?” he added lightly.

“I couldn’t ask her, dearie,” said Martha. “She was terrible late, she

said, and I know how crotched her wicked old grandfather gets at

feeding-time.”

“How big she’s grown!” he observed carelessly.

“Big!” They both repeated the word, but from a different surprise.

“You said you didn’t see her,” said Martha sharply.

“I saw a big young woman flying by in the cart—I didn’t know then it

was Jinny.”

“But you just said everything’s growed so little,” chuckled Caleb.

“So it has—all except Jinny.”

“And she isn’t so very big,” said Martha, “rather undersized, some folks

would say.”

“Well, I’m not so oversized myself,” said Will.

“Will’s seen her toplofty over Methusalem,” explained Caleb. “Wait till

he sees her on her pegs.”

“But I did see her on her pegs,” said Will, “at ‘The Black Sheep’!”

“Then why did you goo and carry that little old box?” inquired Caleb.

“She wasn’t in the cart then—how was I to guess she was the Carrier?”

he answered crossly.

“But you could ha’ ast for the Bradmarsh carrier.”

“The coach was late,” he snapped.

“But Jinny hadn’t started yet,” persisted Caleb. “Bein’ as you seen her

there.”

“Legends, my boy, legends.” Tony Flip’s euphemism for lies rang in

Will’s brain. But legends, he was finding, are not easy to sustain. One

lie breeds many, and he was sorry now he had allowed himself to be made

a champion weight-lifter. “I thought being so late ’twas no use asking

for the Carrier—’twas you I expected,” he said, turning the war back

into the enemy’s country.

But they had now lumbered up with the box to the twin doors, and the

task of dumping down the subject of discussion in a convenient place

stayed the cross-examination.

The feast for the Prodigal Son had been laid in the parlour, and the

scent of the fried sausages came appetizingly on the evening air, more

poetic than any of Nature’s competing odours.

“Why, there’s my letter!” cried Will at the parlour door, beholding it

on the mantelpiece. “You might have let me know you couldn’t meet me.”

He went in and took it down. “Not opened?” he cried crossly, the muggy

atmosphere of the sealed chamber adding to his irritation. “And I told

you exactly the day and hour I was coming!”

“We haven’t had time to get it read yet, dearie,” said Martha mildly. “I

was going to take it to the dressmaker, but Saturdays I’m so busy and

Sunday was Sunday, and yesterday I felt as if my ribs were grating

together, and to-day was too hot.”

“Well, I shan’t write again in a hurry,” he said peevishly, and was

about to tear the letter in twain. But Martha snatched it from him with

a cry and slipped it into her bosom.

“Sit down, Will,” she pleaded. “Your sausages are spoiling.”

But the Prodigal Son would not batten at once upon the fatted calf. He

felt too dusty, he said, and then, imperiously pushing at the

diamond-paned casement and realizing with disgust it would not open,

vanished in search of soap.

“He can’t be well,” whimpered Martha.

“Don’t worrit, dear heart,” Caleb consoled her. “Oi count even Samson

wanted a wash arter he’d lugged that little old gate up the hill from

Gazy.”